The Peter Attia Drive - #142 - Robert Abbott: The Bobby Knight story—a cautionary tale of unchecked anger, ego, and winning at all costs

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

Robert Abbott is a six-time Emmy award winner and the director of “The Last Days of Knight,” the behind-the-scenes documentary of legendary coach Bobby Knight, and the events that led to his termination from Indiana University. In this episode, Robert takes us through his investigative journey, which revealed cautionary tales of a winning at all costs environment—how pain often gets left in the wake of unchecked anger, ego, and perfectionism. Robert reflects on Knight’s legacy and extracts lessons in self-awareness and accountability that can be applied to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself. We discuss: Robert’s career covering sports and interesting athletes (2:30); Robert’s early impression of Bobby Knight’s controversial persona (10:15); The journalistic work that uniquely prepared Robert for his Bobby Knight story (13:30); The cost of excellence in sports—cautionary tales of ‘greatness at any cost’ (19:15); Knight’s coaching style, waning success in the 90s, and what put him on Robert’s radar (25:30); Three alarming accounts from a former player (Neil Reed) that launched Robert’s investigation into Bobby Knight (35:15); The “win-first” environment at Indiana that provided cover for Knight’s toxic behavior (44:45); Knight’s ego swells—a shift from team-first to “I” and “me” (53:00); How patience, honesty, and gaining trust with his sources paid off in his reporting on Bobby Knight (1:01:30); The vicious cycle and anger and shame, and why Bobby Knight is so interesting to Peter (1:08:00); Releasing the choking tape—Breaking open the Knight story, vindicating his earlier reporting, and the most powerful moment Robert has ever witnessed in his journalistic career (1:20:00); The bittersweet story of Neil Reed—triumph, PTSD, and breaking the cycle of pain (1:43:15); Examining Bobby Knight's legacy, and how society can avoid a repeat of similar devastating situations (1:57:30); Final thoughts on Bobby Knight and the pain left in his wake (2:08:00); and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/RobertAbbott  Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe.

Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Robert Abbott. Robert is a documentary filmmaker. He's a director, an amazing storyteller. He's a six-time Emmy award-winning producer and a director with over 30 years of experience in sports and entertainment for that matter. He's the co-creator of E60 on ESPN. He's also the director of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, The Last Days of Night, looking at the untold story behind the scenes, story of Bobby Knight

and the events that ultimately led to his termination from Indiana University. I wanted to talk to Robert for reasons I will explain in this podcast, because you may be wondering what the heck does this have to do with longevity or anything that has to do with living better? And the short answer is I can't really explain that in a sentence or two, but it becomes very clear throughout this episode why I wanted to talk with Robert, who I would consider to be one of the experts now on Bobby Knight. We talk about a lot of things here, but most of it really is about the investigative work that went into the last days of Knight. And of course, some of the things that Robert learned along the way and basically the 15 years of his career prior to that and why I think that prepared him to be the right person to do this. There's one note I want to make

before we jump into this, which is there is a lot of profanity in this. That's just the nature of what this episode is about. So it's a little graphic at times and there is quite a bit of profanity. So I just want folks to be aware of that. If that upsets them in any way, shape or form, I apologize. And without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Robert Abbott. Hey, Robert, it's awesome to sit down with you today. You're one of the few people that I just sort of randomly reached out to who actually responded to me. So I was super excited that day when I sent you a direct message on Twitter. And then next day you said, yeah, let's chat.

And I really appreciate it because I know responding to random strangers is always buyer beware. I'm really excited to do this because once you reached out to me, I listened to some of your podcasts and I said, I'd love to do it. So I'm ready to go. We're going to talk a lot today about a guy named Bobby Knight, who I suspect most people listening to this know a little bit about, or maybe even know a lot about. And I suspect some of these people will have even seen the unbelievable documentary that you produced with ESPN, The Last Days of Night, which we'll get to in significant detail. But I think to understand the work that you did there, maybe people need a bit more of an understanding of who you are as a journalist and some of the other things that

you have done. So I'll start with perhaps the most pedestrian of questions, but what drew you to journalism? Growing up, I was always a fan of sports and I watched a lot of TV. So I think it was natural that I got into sports television. I went to Florida State University. I was, to be honest, in my early life, golf drove my life. I was a competitive golfer. I played in the Future Masters, Junior Orange Bowl, Tournament of Champions, all the major tournaments for young people or juniors. And I decided to walk on and try to play for Florida State.

So I went there for golf. That lasted about a year. It was just so much work and I got redshirted, played in a couple tournaments. And once I gave it up, I got into media performance or the communications department at Florida State University. And specifically media communications was media performance. I wanted to be an on-air kind of sportscaster. And I took a journalism class, ironically, at Florida A&M University. Florida State didn't offer it. And I was just fascinated by it. It interested me. I never thought that's where my career would go. My career started once I graduated. I had done an internship at CNN Sports,

and I had done one at a local TV station. So the day after I graduated, I had done an internship at CNN Sports, and I had done one at a local TV station. So the day after I graduated, I started at the local TV station as a cameraman, an editor, an on-air reporter. I was like the nighttime reporter. They would send me to city commission meetings and a lot of things that bored me to death. And I would always be like, send me to the high school football game, send me to the high school basketball game or the college game. So I always wanted to gravitate to sports. I got laid off, ironically, from that first job. They canceled the 11 o'clock news, got rid of three quarters of the staff.

They decided to play MASH reruns instead because they would get the same commercial dollars in for MASH. And they didn't have to fund a 30-person newsroom. So I went back to CNN. I started there as an associate producer, then a producer, and I started to gravitate into becoming a storyteller. First and foremost, I love sports and the drama of sports and the stories of sports. But after I covered a number of World Series, Masters, you name the event, that became boring. And I don't want to say unfulfilling, but who wins and loses is pretty simple. And I always wanted to go deeper. I always wanted to go deeper. So I started doing profiles, becoming a feature producer,

traveling around the country and spending time with people. I just love the psychology of sports, what makes someone great, what they have to sacrifice to give it up. And that's kind of what shaped my early career at CNN. Was there ever an experience where you were deciding, okay, I'm going to do a profile on such and such an athlete and you finally get to meet them and there's a letdown because of either just their personality and doesn't match what you expected or the depth or introspection that you would be hoping is there, isn't there. I would say I've had that experience myself, not just with athletes, frankly, sometimes with people in other

professions where when you don't know them, you create a persona of them that's probably unfair. You meet them and you're sort of like, that's arguably the most uninteresting person I've ever met. Did you ever have that experience with athletes when you were doing this? Dozens of times, countless times. Interestingly, I started at CNN, excuse me, sports in 1987. On around 91, they wanted me to go up and head up the New York Bureau. That fell through at the last minute. And my boss at the time, Jim Walton, called me in and said, hey, I'm sorry it fell through. I really wanted that to happen.

Would you be interested in covering the Olympics? And I said, sure. I grew up as a kid watching the Olympics, watching Olga Korbit, Nadia Komanić, all of the profiles. And I didn't realize this until I was much older, probably in my 40s, maybe in my 50s, how much of an impact that had on me. Like I sat in front, I was fascinated by their human stories, which Rune Arledge did, Dick Ebersole has since done. And when I got that job, exactly what you said came true. was my dream job and i went and met a number of these

olympic athletes and i want to say more often than not that may be a little unfair but to become great many of them were one-dimensional and they weren't interesting to me they were either speed skaters skated in a circle for six hours a day, went home, rested and came back and skated for two more hours or weightlifters. I remember I did some pieces on some weightlifters and I'm like, what do you do? What do you do for fun? And they wake up at six and they have their workout. Then they go and eat. Then they rest. Then they work out again. And doing those in the early years when I did a lot of profiles for the Olympics, I remember the people who fascinated me because they were just different. And I realized that's what I'm drawn to, people who have a story to tell. The way I describe it is I'm only interested in a story

if it's an onion. If you can just peel off layer after layer after layer after layer, and the more layers you can peel off the more interested that character is to me. I did a piece on a swimmer Gary Hall Jr. lived out in Phoenix and he was just a free spirit. He had taken a VW bus and redone it and I found that fascinating. We shot it. It's very visual. He would wear a boxing robe out in shadow box on the blocks. He was just a character and I loved him and I loved the three, four days I spent with him. And one day we were there and I said, oh, what do you do? He goes, I skateboard a lot. And he's like, hey, let's bust my little brother out of school. So we rode along with him as he walked

into the principal's office and said, hey, my brother has a doctor's appointment. I need to get him out and need to get him out now. And he came and we were skateboarding and his little brother was holding onto the bumper of his VW bus as we're rolling down the street. And guys like Gary Hall Jr. fascinated me. And so I always gravitated to people like that. I did early on in 91, the winter of 91 for the 92 Winter Olympics. early on in 91, the winter of 91 for the 92 Winter Olympics, I went up and did, I spent some time with the Jamaican bobsled team, hung out with them. It was just great because there were a bunch of characters. Did a story on Prince Albert who drove for Monaco, their bobsled team, the Latvian bobsled team, because the wall had just come down, communism had ended. Because the wall had just come down.

Communism had ended. And I didn't know this, but most of the gold medal winning drivers for Russia were Latvian. So for the first time in their life, they had pride. They're like, if we win a medal, it's for Latvia, not for the Soviet Union. So when you peel away the layers, that's what interested me as a storyteller. I always try to gravitate to stories like that. So let's say it's 91 and you're up and running on these other things. By this point, bringing the story back to our main character, Bobby Knight, he's already won three national championships, right?

Bobby Knight at this point is probably in his early 50s. He's coached the 84 Olympic men's team. So he's got a gold medal and three national championships to his name, including that epic season. I forget which one it was, maybe 77, 76. 75. 75 when they went undefeated as well. 75 was they lost one and then 76 they went undefeated. So how much were you paying attention to this guy, Bobby Knight, back in the early 90s? I was a sports fan as a kid in the 70s, so I don't remember the undefeated season.

But I do remember Isaiah Thomas winning the national title in 81. I do remember him coaching the Olympic team in 84. I remember vividly reading John Feinstein's book, A Season on the Brink. I had just graduated college. I loved to read books, and I read a number of them, not just in sports. I read everything on the Vietnam War I could get my hands on across the board. And I remember grabbing that book and devouring it in a few days. And I was fascinated by him. He would, in the book, Feinstein painted a picture where Knight would ride somebody, I believe it was Daryl Thomas, and call him a pussy and you

have got no guts or whatever. And then Thomas would go back to his locker and he'd open it and there'd be a box of tampons in there. And I was just like, whoa, I couldn't believe what I was reading. And yet, as I thought about it at the time, and this is the book came out in 87. As I thought about it, the book ends, Feinstein ends with a line that says, it always comes back to the question that ends justify the means. And I remember closing the book. And in my own mind saying, yes, he's won three national titles, an Olympic gold medal, and I've never heard a player speak negatively about him. So when I closed that book, I said, yes, the ends do justify the means. I had no idea that 13 years later, my boss would give me an assignment that ultimately I would be asking that same question and presenting it kind of to the country. You see, to me, that's probably one of the most interesting

coincidences of this story, right? Is that that book comes out, as you said, it's sort of 87, whatever you read it immediately. And at that point in time, you see the part of the iceberg above the water, again, as you would learn later, and we would all learn through your work, even in 87, there were plenty of indications that there were players who had they been asked would have something different to say than maybe what was presented. But I really love this thing that 13 years later, your world collides with this guy in a way that you couldn't have imagined. And of course, in the intervening time, a lot would happen. You would go on to cover the Atlanta Olympics, which in and of itself is kind of an

amazing story, not just because of the bombing, but all that went on there. So fast forward me a little bit from call it 87 into the nineties. What else are you working on it? Perhaps more importantly, how is it helping you prepare for what might turn into be one of the most difficult assignments of your career? After reading that book and leaving the local station, going back to CNN, covering a lot of sports in the moment, and you named the event, I've covered it. And you have to turn stories quickly. A guy hits a home run in the bottom of the ninth, and within 30 minutes, you have to have the story written and sent back to Atlanta and then to the world. As a journalist, I learned to make decisions quickly.

Not always the right one, but you get a ton of at-bats and you learn. I always, like I said earlier, gravitated toward telling the story of people and the psychology of people and what makes them tick. I used to sit around, Nick Charles and I traveled the world. He was the lead anchor in CNN Sports. I remember vividly being at the Cooperstown for the Baseball Hall of Fame and sitting on the back porch, and Nick loved his wine, and he's having wine and cheese, and we're just talking,

and we were knocking around names of people we wanted to profile. And we talked about Bob Knight. We both wanted to go fishing with him, wanted to hang out with him just to see what made him tick and look inside because not knowing it at the time, but he was that onion to me that I knew if you peeled away layers that he would be a fascinating character. Again, not knowing that in 1999, four, six, eight years later, I would be asked to look into him. Prior to 99, for the first handful of years I was at CNN, I covered events. Then I became a feature producer, the Olympic producer. And then I started getting special projects. I did some documentaries for CNN. I did one on Title IX, which is about it's, you know, shoe leather reporting. They were getting rid of then swim programs,

gymnastic programs to try to balance the scales of Title IX with football. So that was some long form storytelling where you spend a lot of time on a story. I also did one that I didn't know the impact it would have until actually I did this film. I did a documentary called Field of Screams. And it was about, the first documentary was so successful for CNN. And we did it on such a small budget that the documentary department for news wanted us to do more. The World Cup was coming to the United States and I was fascinated by soccer hooligans. And so I had pitched a story like, is this going to be coming to America? I read the book Among the Thugs. If you've never read it, it's a great read. It's a literary kind of editor who immersed himself amongst the soccer hooligans in England and went into the psychology of how those riots start.

And it was fascinating to me. And that's what I wanted to do. But my bosses said, no, it's not really going to translate to an American audience. But the idea of kind of fan violence in sports did. So my film became much more about stalking, death threats. I went and we'd spent some time, Jim Huber and I, with Mitch Williams, who gave up the home run in game six to lose to

the Toronto Blue Jays. He and his wife talked about what it was like. This was the guy that played for the Phillies? Yes. He was the reliever, wild thing, Mitch Williams. Real character. Again, you peel away layers. he was a character. He said what he would think. And to sit there and listen, we went out to a ranch. He had a ranch out in Texas. And he and his wife were there explaining what those days were like during the World Series. He had given up the home run.

He was back at his home in New Jersey. And he had gotten tons of death threats. And his wife said, we lived in an old house and the floors creaked. And she said, I remember vividly him walking around with a gun in his hand because the wind's blowing outside and things are creaking and people had been outside the house. And so I tried to take people inside because we hear it. We hear somebody gets a death threat and it doesn't really sink in. But to really have someone take you behind what that threat is and how it impacts them mentally and emotionally

was fascinating. The other thing I looked into is stalking. This was part of it. It was kind of like why fans will riot after winning the World Series or the Super Bowl. What will happen when a fan sends a death threat to an athlete? And the other one was stalking. We looked at the Monica Sellers stabbing. I ended up meeting two of the more fascinating people I've ever interviewed. Dr. Park Dietz runs a threat assessment group in San Diego, and he's the psychologist, psychiatrist, and I'm probably going to get his title wrong, who spent 40 hours interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer so he could prove that what he did was sane, the thought process of what he did so he couldn't use the insanity play. So just to talk to him over lunch was fascinating

to me. And the other one was Dr. Gavin DeBecker. And at the time, he was the one that every star went to if they got death threats or threatening mail. Madonna, Letterman, all the stars of that era. And I followed the story of Katerina Witt, who was stalked for three years. So you ask me how these things prepared me. I spent nine months on this documentary. It wasn't two days, three days, three weeks, three months. It was a long time.

So these documentaries prepared me in how to tell a story at an hour level, how to tell a story at a two hour level, all the different places you could take kind of a narrative yarn. So I had done those two documentaries at CNN. Those two things probably prepared me the most for what the assignment I was going to get in 1999. Now in the nineties, were there other examples that came to you that would ultimately serve as basically reminders of this idea that the cost of excellence in sports, you know, were there other examples of sports or athletes even that you covered where you could say, hey, have we gone too far in society?

Have we let this athlete or coach get away with things simply on the basis of their greatness? And maybe we need to revisit that. I can think of a couple of examples in retrospect, although I will admit at the time I was blind to it. Who came to your mind? Who are the two that came to your mind? I think Mike Tyson comes to my mind. I grew up as a huge boxing fan, like lived for boxing.

Absolutely the single most important thing in my life from the age of 13 onward. When you think about the Mike Tyson of the late 80s and early 90s, I mean, an incredible talent who was completely out of control. And in retrospect, of course, now with the wisdom of being an old man, it's a very clear understanding of what a traumatic childhood he had and how that childhood would produce a knife that is very sharp on two sides, right? On the one hand, it made him an unbelievably rage-filled fighter and he built up an armor to make sure he could never be hurt again. But without fixing any of the underlying problems, he basically was going to be a nonstop

hurting machine outside the ring as well. That's certainly one example that comes to me. I think the other one just sort of looking back would probably be Tiger Woods. I don't follow golf that closely, but when you look at everything that sort of unfolded in Tiger's life, call it 10 years ago, you get the sense that this guy who was such a prodigy may not have had enough people around him that could say, Hey, let's revisit how you're going to sort of live your life. And things probably just got out of control. But again, when you're so dominant and you're winning and the money is there and the titles are there, I think it's easy to overlook these things. So I guess I'm not saying these things to be critical of the athletes. I'm saying them more as with a little bit of wisdom, I look back

and go, huh, that's interesting. And of course, Knight, I think will end up being arguably one of the most extreme examples of that. Kind of goes back a little bit to the onion where people, why do you like Andre Agassi, but not Pete Sampras? Because people whose great moments and worst moments aren't separated by that much are not as fascinating. But you get somebody like Knight, who in one area is brilliant and a genius, and he's exceptional at so many different things, and he's so flawed in others. That's why people like Tiger, Tyson, and Knight fascinated me. I didn't spend any time around Mike Tyson. We had a group that did a lot of our boxing.

Ironically, I was going to go out for the Tyson-Holofield fight, but when he got arrested and incarcerated for rape, that fight never happened. That was going to be my first time out there. But when he got out of prison, I did a show for ESPN of him returning to the ring. And I was fascinated by him. And to this day, I am. I have a curiosity, I think, like you, into what the environment and the situation that forms these people. There's things that, as you eloquently said, that it sharpens the knife and it's on both sides, good and bad. And I always wonder with Mike, if he was surrounded by better people, would his better character traits have come to the surface? I think you've seen Mike in the last five to 10 years that he does have a sensitive side,

he does have a caring side. He's not a horrible monster, but there was years where he acted that way. When I did that documentary, I spoke to the president of HBO Sports at the time, and after the interview ended, he told some stories of Mike and his guys renting hotel rooms, suites in Philadelphia,

and just marching as many women through there as they could in a three-day span. Told you things that the general public didn't know what was going on. And he was surrounded by people. I think the challenge is when you're a cash cow for everyone, they're worried about you making money. They're not really worried about you and the underlying things that you need to work on that you mentioned, because that doesn't make them money. They want to get as much money out of you as they can.

So they're going to let you do what you want until that gravy train of money runs dry. And I think that's sadly what happened to Mike with Don King or Rory Holloway. I always felt that when you go back to the beginning of Tyson's career, I mean, look, there's probably nobody who was able to look at him purely as a person, including Custom Auto, who was really a father figure to him. But there was a guy back involved in his life early on, Steve Lott. Most people probably wouldn't recognize that name unless they're real aficionados of Tyson history back in the mid 80s. But I always felt like Steve Lott was probably, along with maybe even Teddy Atlas, were kind of people that could have kept Tyson on the straight and narrow. managed by these two guys that were ridiculously shrewd and created kind of a grotesque deal where they took a third of his purses, which was legally permitted, but obviously by any stretch of the imagination is completely disgusting. But one of the two Tyson did have a fond affection for,

a guy named Jimmy Jacobs, who died in early 88. The other guy, Bill Caton, he had no relationship with. And I always felt that the end of Tyson was actually the death of Jacobs because D'Amato died in 85. He'd already by that point kicked Teddy Atlas out of the camp. Actually D'Amato did, which was a huge mistake. He'd canned Steve Lott on the basis of Don King sort of brainwashing him and then Jimmy Jacobs dies. And then this is all before the Spinks fight. The Spinks fight was really the last fight, in my opinion, where he went in as a great fighter and everything thereafter was sort of downhill. Let's turn to Bobby Knight. Let's talk about when this first became the lead thing for you. So is it easier, I guess, maybe you could

give people a little bit of the history of what's happening tonight in the 90s and then how you're getting brought into it. He won his last national championship in the late 80s. And in the 90s, he still had good teams, 20 win seasons, but he started getting bounced in the first or second round of the tournament. And again, other than being a sports fan, I was never assigned to cover him. I was never, but I followed it like probably the rest of America. You kind of just kept waiting for him to get that player or get that sign of class that would put him back on top. He had gone from 76 to 81 to 87.

There's five to six years in between each of those. So in the early 90s, you're like, oh, he's going to come back. And he just wasn't. And other than just being a sports fan, he really wasn't on my radar. Then in 1999, Luke Recker announces he's leaving Indiana. For those people who don't know, Luke Recker was the leading scorer, got the most minutes. He was kind of the star of the team. What year was he in? Sophomore? He was after his sophomore season, he did leave. That's when my boss, Steve Robinson, I was at this point at CNN, I did the Olympics. I did special projects. And then wherever they needed me, because I like variety, I get bored doing the same thing did the Olympics. I did special projects. And then wherever they needed me,

because I like variety, I get bored doing the same thing all the time. So, hey, you need somebody to cover the World Series, I'll go. If you need me to do this, I'll go. Hey, if somebody's going on vacation, need a line producer in the studio, they'd plug me in there for three weeks. So I had variety. I had come back from a site survey in Sydney, Australia for the 2000 Olympics. I went ahead a year in advance to set everything up for CNN. And I had just gotten back and my boss said, oh, what do you want to do? We're just talking about it. I don't know, a day or two later, Steve called me in the office and said, hey, Luke Recker just left Indiana. And we talked about it. And he said, why don't you look in to why? He's the third McDonald's High School All-American in the last two and a half years to leave the program.

And he's the most popular player there, getting the most minutes. Normally, somebody who's unhappy leaves a program. Your leading scorer usually doesn't leave. And I remember sitting in Steve's office, not being very excited at all about this assignment. I was just like, it's going to be a waste of time. Steve and I talked about how we thought it may be more of a story on AAU basketball and how these athletes are coming out of high school with inflated egos, big sense of themselves, and they can't play for a guy like Coach Knight anymore.

They have a sense of entitlement. So we thought the story may kind of focus on that. The explosion of AAU basketball, how these guys are stars now at 16, 17, and 18, and they're not willing to be coached in college anymore. I vividly remember walking out across the newsroom of Steve's office back to my desk, just not being that excited, thinking it's going to be a waste of time. And maybe for the listener, Robert, give people a bit of background on Bobby Knight's coaching philosophy, starting at West Point, himself obviously winning a national title, really being

a guy that coaches a team, not a star, even though stars came out of the program. What about his coaching style led you to the conclusion that, hey, a 16-year-old high school star might just be not willing to be coached under that system? What was your preconceived idea? I thought what I think most people in America thought is these guys just aren't tough enough. Coach Knight came out of Orville, Ohio. He went to Ohio State and he was a role player on their national championship team with John Havlicek, Lucas, et cetera. And shortly after that, he went on to Army to coach. By the age of 24, he was the head coach at Army.

And then from there, he went on to Indiana. And he very much took what he learned at Army and applied it. The sense of, I'm going to break you down to nothing and then build you back up into the person I want you to be. So he was hard on players. It was team before I or me or you. It was very much about his system. It was very much about unselfish basketball, playing defense, moving your feet. It was about sharing the basketball. It was about there's no stars on my team. Other than Isaiah Thomas, I mean, the 76 team had a lot of great players, but Isaiah Thomas was probably, I don't want

to offend anybody who went to IU, probably the only transcendent player that went there. Isaiah was a little different. But the 87 team, again, they had Steve Alford, et cetera, but there was no superstar talents. So Knight was all about team basketball. And he was very hard. The portrait I had of Knight in my head and the knowledge I had of him and the assignment, it just kind of added up that these kids weren't tough enough. They're wimps.

They're soft. They're pampered. They're entitled. And they couldn't take it. And that's kind of the message that was put out when they left. Year and a half, two years earlier, Neil Reed had left. And they said he wasn't tough enough. And then Jason Collier had left.

And then, you know, there's whispers and rumors of why, et cetera. And then it wasn't until Wrecker left that my boss said, wait a second, something's going on up there. And Steve had a great sense. something's going on up there. And Steve had a great sense. Steve Robinson had come from Sports Illustrated when CNN and Sports Illustrated merged to create CNNSI, a sports network, and he had headed up their investigations for the magazine. So he had a great sense for news. It wasn't me. I didn't think this was a story he did. And he said, go look into it. And so that's the mindset I took into it. I knew who Knight was. I knew how hard he was on players. And I just thought what I was going to find out is these

guys just didn't want to do it. And they wanted to go somewhere where a coach would just roll out the basketballs, let him play, let him be the star, not play defense, maybe not even work as hard. So I wasn't excited. I didn't think there was anything there there. So when you show up, is Wrecker already gone? Yes. Is Reed still playing at this point in time? And Reed went to where? Reed went to Kentucky, if I recall, right? Reed went to, he was recruited by Kentucky, but he went to Southern Miss. Okay. And Collier was already gone as well. He had gone to Georgia Tech to play for Bobby Cremins. So Reed, when I called him, he had just finished at Southern Miss. Collier was playing at Georgia Tech and Rekker was

transferring at the time he was going to go to Arizona, got in a horrible accident in Colorado. He decided to stay closer to home, so he enrolled at Iowa after I started looking into it. So Steve called me into the office the morning after the announcement that Rekker left. Interestingly, Rekker faxed in notice to Coach Knight at midnight, sent a fax at midnight saying, I'm not returning. It happened to be when Coach Knight was leaving for a trip for Cuba. And it was just like, that's a weird way to say I'm leaving. That interested me a little bit. So the next morning, my boss says, hey, do you see the news? Luke Recker just left. Start making some phone calls, go up there and try to figure out what's going on. Why are really good players leaving Indiana and Bob Knight's

program? That was the assignment. And what I've learned since then is all great investigative assignments start with a really simple question. Why did somebody break into the Democratic National Headquarters? That led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. It's a simple question. And my simple question was, Steve said, go find out why good players are leaving Coach Knight's program. And it was as simple as that. It wasn't an investigation. It's just a question. And we thought it would take us down this society kind of a look at society. Entitlement, it was not an investigation at all at the start. But it became an investigation with a couple of my first phone calls.

I did a lot of reading. Two days later, it was a Sunday night. I called and Neil Reed's dad picked up and he and I talked. And he didn't hold anything back. Terry told me everything. And this was off the record or on the record? It was off the record. Again, I was just trying to understand the story. And then I called Neil that Sunday night. And Neil and I talked for about 90 minutes. And in the film, for those people who haven't seen it, I saved everything.

I can't tell you, I probably had a dozen notebooks from the 18 months I reported this, where I took notes on people's phone calls and everything. And I saved them all. They were in a box in my basement for 15 years. And when I did the film, I went back and just opened the box, sat here in my office with three cameras on me and just went through every single thing I pulled out. It took like six or seven hours and it just refreshed my memory and it became the spine of the film. So Terry Reed spoke to me and then Neil spoke to me. And what did Neil tell you on that first call? He told me why he went to Indiana. He loved Indiana. His father was a basketball coach. His father,

much like Coach Knight, was a hard ass. His father admired, I think probably loved Coach Knight's style. And Terry was very much a coach in the mold of Bob Knight, so much so that the family moved to Bloomington for Neal's beginning of his high school years, freshman and sophomore. Then he moved back to Louisiana and Neal became two-time state player of the year. He never made another visit. He knew he was always going to go to Coach Knight. He wanted to play for Coach Knight. Neal was a tough-minded kid. The tougher it was, the tougher he got. He wanted to go to Coach Knight, play for Coach Knight because he wanted to go play for somebody who was going to push him and make him better. And he told me, you could just

tell the love he had for Indiana basketball and specifically Coach Knight. And that's why he went there. And then we started talking about why he left. And he just took me through his three seasons there. And he started painting a picture of what it was like day after day after day after day. There was three things that stuck out to me that became the spine of my reporting in 1999 and 2000 when I was at CNN. One was that at a practice one day, they were running a drill. Larry Richardson was a big man. And Coach Knight had always taught Neil, the point guard, hey, talk to your team. Command their presence.

Command their attention. You're running it. And he always wanted him to talk to the players during the play. So they ran this play where Neal threw a bounce pass into Larry Richardson. Larry made the layup and coach was like, that's great, Larry. That's great, great. And then coach Knight laid into Neal. Why the hell didn't you call out his name? Why didn't you talk to him? Why didn't you basically direct him to what to do? He gave all this praise to Larry and then just laid into Neil in kind of an unrelenting fashion that was Coach Knight style. And Neil said,

I did. And Knight was like, no, you didn't. Yes, I did. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. And then Neil made the mistake, if you look at it as a mistake, to say, Larry, did I? And Larry Richardson said, yes, you did. And that embarrassed Coach Knight. And that's when Coach Knight, according to Neil at this time, came at him and grabbed him by the throat. That story interested me because if it was true, it's an assault. I kept talking to Neil about the aftermath and other things that had happened. And he told me two other stories that jumped off the pages of my notes. One was that one time he had kicked the president of the university, Miles Brand, out of practice. Anybody who's been around Indiana basketball knows that practices are closed.

You're not allowed in there unless Coach Knight lets you. There's a padlock and a chain on the practice. Anybody who's been around Indiana basketball knows that practices are closed. You're not allowed in there unless Coach Knight lets you. There's a padlock and a chain on the doors. No one's allowed in to see what he does. So one day the university president was there, brought some people in on a tour and was kind of talking out loud to the group that he was with. And Coach Knight said something to the effect of, shut the F up. I don't come into your office and talk while you're trying to work. Get the hell out of here. And Miles Brand and the people he was with got up and left. And looking back, I don't think Coach Knight literally got in his face and said it. I think he said it out loud for the whole gym to hear. He may have not even been looking at Coach Brand, but the message was sent. At that point, I was like, holy shit,

you've got the balls to throw the president out of practice? Like, who's running this school? And then the third story Neil told me is one time they were playing real poorly and they were in the locker room and Coach Knight came out of a bathroom stall with his pants around his ankles, with toilet paper in his hand, and he had wiped himself. And he showed the toilet paper to the players and said, this is how you guys are playing. You're playing like shit. And he brandished soiled toilet paper to the team. And those three stories, I mean, jumped off, A, my notes that night and jumped through the phone in the 90-minute call we had. So I had this all on background, off the record, not for attribution. But as I wrote in my note to my boss, Steve, I said to him, and I read it in the film, I go, I think he's going to tell me this on the record one day.

I go, I think he's going to tell me this on the record one day. And so that first phone call that I made to Neil Reed and when he picked up the phone, all of a sudden it turned from a story in my mind about society, entitlement of AAU basketball players, are they willing to be coached, is night too tough, to an investigation, did these three things happen? Can I confirm that these three incidents took place? So when you get off that phone call, what does your intuition tell you? Does your intuition say this kid is making this up? He's a disgruntled former player? Or does your intuition say this is possibly right? The ends no longer justify the means. Which way are you leaning at this point?

50-50, because exactly what you said ran through my mind. I'm like, he's probably disgruntled. Is he exaggerating? Did it really happen? But he described them in such detail that there was a lot of validity to what he said. And again, part of what I've learned is if you're going to do a good investigation, you can't get too excited and you can't get too down. Like you just have to be even keel. And the one thing I'm proudest of is during this process, I just kept my nose to the grindstone. I never really looked up. We can talk later. There's three times I kind of popped my head up and saw what was happening. But the rest of the time, when I got off that phone call, exactly what you said was

rushing through my mind. Is he a disgruntled player who's out to get Coach Knight? Or is there truth to this? And that was kind of my mantra. And as I say in the film, I got on a plane the next day. I talked to my boss and I'm like, I got to fly to Indiana. And I'm looking out the window and I was like, is he lying to me? Is this kid lying to me or not? As I looked out the window, that's what I was thinking. And I was also thinking that if he's not, there's a story here. That's when I got interested. After that first phone call with Neil, I said, I have to figure out if he's telling me the truth. And if he is telling me the truth, how do I turn this into a story where people are willing to sit on camera and talk about it? So where do you go from there? Do you go to

Collier? Do you go to Wrecker? How do you, I assume they're going to be an easier place to start than any currently active player, right? Basically, what I did is I took a big step back and I said, I have to understand Indiana basketball. The first person I interviewed is Gary Donna. He passed away just within the last two years. And he's the first person I sat down with. And he started Hoosier Basketball Magazine. For those people who don't follow high school and college basketball, it is the thing in the state of Indiana. High school basketball is the heartbeat of that state. And he follows high school basketball. Every season he puts out the definitive thing on high school basketball.

So he knows all these kids from 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th grade, all the way through high school. So when I spoke to him, it was the first interview I did. He just told me what he knew about it. And what he said that made my initial reporting and is also in the film is that Coach Knight is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that he can be the most charming, brilliant person in the world. And then when he gets behind the closed doors, I told you his practices are closed. When he gets behind the closed doors, he can lose it and he wants nobody to see that side of him. And what you said earlier, you'd see the tip of the iceberg, but you never saw the whole iceberg underneath.

So everything he told me led me to believe that there may be truth to what Neil said. But again, as a journalist, Gary Donna wasn't there, so he can't confirm any of those stories. But he painted a picture in an environment. I think there may be some validity to what he said. The other thing that gave me a sense that what Neil may have said is true is because Gary Donna told me, he said, I've known these kids, many of the in-state kids and even the out-of-state kids who come there, he follows recruiting so that they talk to him.

A lot of them had gone to the school and they'd see him at an event or a high school game and they'd just talk to him. What's it like? What was your time like? So they talked to him because his magazine doesn't print that, right? So he just told me story after story after story. So that was the baseline. That first interview kind of was foundational for me, that it gave me a sense of what it's like and why the

administration is afraid of Coach Knight. It didn't confirm what Neil said, but he painted a picture of an atmosphere where what Neil told me, now I understood that it may have happened and it could have, that environment exists. Now look, it wasn't like Bobby Knight hadn't said and done things up until the point that we're talking about now that weren't already putting him in a league beyond what you're hearing from Neil Reid, right? I mean, in 1988, he made an absolutely ridiculous statement to Connie Chung on air that, I mean, to this day, I still can't believe a human would say that, let alone a guy would say that and still have a job. You remember the statement, of course. Yes. Ironically, Connie Chung was doing a special on stress and they picked Coach Knight because he has a stressful job or whatever. Somehow the topic of rape came up and Coach Knight said

something to the effect of, if rape is inevitable, lay back and enjoy it. And what he went on to say is, hey, you can't control it. The plane's down. You can't do anything about it. He would have been fired within 15 minutes in 2020 if that came out. And probably in 2005 and probably in 1995. But in 1998, he was the most powerful man in the state of Indiana. I was aware of that incident. I was aware of the chair throw a number of years before during a game where he threw the chair across the court while someone was at the foul line. I didn't know the impact of it. And to

be honest, Peter, I didn't realize how important that moment was until I did the film 18 years after my reporting. What I learned by having 18 years of hindsight is that at that point, Knight had won three the Bloomington Faculty Council was so offended by the John Feinstein book that they wanted to look into Knight's conduct. And they put together kind of a bill of rights for athletes that said no coach should verbally or mentally abuse their athletes. And I uncovered this. This was in 1999 during my reporting. And I was like, wow, they knew about this in 1987.

And I'm reporting on it in 1999. The timeline is they were looking into kind of reprimanding Coach Knight, reining him in, knowing he's out of control. And what does Knight do? He wins the national championship. Now they cannot put a saddle on, there's no way, the horse is out of the barn and it is so far down the road that there's no coming back. He was a legend, he was the most powerful man in the state. So when he said that with Connie Chung, there was a huge outcry initially. The president released a tempered statement that said something to the effect of Coach Knight's quote does not reflect Indiana University. It was very middle of the road, kind of. It didn't chastise him

or go after him. And what Coach Knight did is he went and interviewed for a job at New Mexico. And as Alexander Wolff, Sports Illustrated basketball writer, he's written so many books on basketball, one of the best minds in the sport. In my film, he said it was a shot across the bow at the president. Coach Knight was like, really? You're going to put out a statement about me? I'll go to New Mexico and let's see what happens. All of a sudden, the entire state is up in arms, now attacking the president. Not attacking Coach Knight for what he said, but attacking the president like, you're going to drive away Bob Knight? He just won a national championship,

three national championships and Olympic gold medal. And so that shot across the bow gave Knight the power he needed to survive up until 2000, if that makes sense. They knew about him in 87. They were trying to do something. He won the national title. He makes a horrible statement to Connie Chung in 88. But he survives all the way until 2000. And that's because he basically showed who was boss in the state. The president of the university wasn't. Coach Knight was. And a number of presidents changed during his 29 years at Indiana.

But Coach Knight remained. And that's why he was allowed to exist through the late 80s and early 90s, although it happened until 2000. Did his behavior publicly get worse over time? I mean, you go to YouTube and you can find no shortage of best moments in press conferences. And you could watch that and come away thinking there's not a press conference where this guy is not unhinged, but presumably those are just the highlights. So it was clear that he had unbelievable disdain for the press when he didn't like their questions. I mean,

he was unbelievably rude in a way that you just don't see it even amongst professional athletes. There were many examples of him just telling a reporter to go fuck themselves. Like, you're a fucking idiot. I mean, what the fuck? Shut the fuck up. That's a dumb fucking question, right? Yeah. Showing up to a press conference with a bullwhip, telling everybody he's going to whip his players with it. As you said, throwing chairs. Having an African-American player, this was at the NCAA tournament, I believe it was Calvert Chaney. He had a player bend over and he went and he's like, you can't touch me. I'm going

to do what I want. To answer your question, as media grew from the 70s, the 80s, to the 90s, up until 2000, we had greater access to him. I don't think he fundamentally changed. to him. I don't think he fundamentally changed. People have asked me this a lot. Was he the same person in 2000 as he was in the early 70s when he went to Indiana? And I said, fundamentally, he was the same. What I think changed was he had success at Army. He came to Indiana, had immediate success, took him to the Final Four in the second year, won a national title immediate success, took him to the Final Four in the second year, won a national title in 76, won two more in an Olympic gold medal. So the ends justified the means during that run from when he first got to Indiana up until 1987. But when he started getting eliminated in the first or second round of the tournament, and these incidents became more and more public, I personally believe

he took it out on his players and said, it can't be me. I've won three national titles, Olympic gold medal. It has to be you. And if you put yourself in the position of those players, I don't know if what he did to Neil Reed's class was any different than what he did to Kent Benson's class or Isaiah Thomas's class, but you'll put up with a lot of shit all year long. And if you win the national championship, you forget about a lot of it and you're a hero forever. But when you start losing in the first and second round of the tournament, you're less willing to put up with that. So did he change? Did he get

worse? I think what I've come to understand is in the early 70s and 80s, right when he'd push you to your breaking point, he'd throw his arm around, you walk out of practice, say something to you for 15 seconds, and it all went away and you're willing to run through a wall for him. And next thing you know, they're fitting you for a national championship ring and you're like, hey, it was all worth it. But in the 90s, instead of throwing his arm around kids, there's the tirade that was caught on audio in 91. He took it out on them. And anybody can Google, you know, Bob Knight audio locker room. Yeah, this is the one for the Purdue game. but there's an interesting point about that, Robert, which is any player that was asked about that doesn't remember it specifically because they basically say something to the effect of that happened every day. That

just happens to be one that got recorded, but that's what every single day in the locker room was like. It's not like, okay, that was a really bad day and we were really playing badly and he went a little too far, but it stands out. And I remembered it's like, okay, that was a really bad day and we were really playing badly and he went a little too far, but it stands out and I remember it. It's like nobody actually remembers that discussion. That's one of my questions to Richard Mandeville, who played for five years for Coach Knight. I said, you've heard the audio on the internet. And he immediately said, that's what I wish everybody who was watching this would understand, that that's every day. And what interests me, because I recommend everybody who listens to this, go listen to the audio and you hear the F-bombs and the GDs and all the profanity, but listen to how many times Coach Knight says, I or me.

Here's a guy from his days at Army. It's about team. It's not about an individual. It's not about I. It's not about me. And that's what everybody in the state of Indiana, and that's what I admired about him, that it was about teamwork. But in that, you will not put me in that fucking position again. I've had to sit around for a year with an 8 and 10 record. If you do that to me again, I will run you. It's I and me, I and me, I and me, I and me. And I think that's where Coach Knight possibly changed in the 90s. He had been so successful that when he started not being successful, in his mind, it was, it can't be me. It's got to be my players.

And then he wasn't throwing his arm around him. He'd push him to the breaking point in the 70s and 80s and then reel him back in just enough to push him again, to reel him back in, to win titles. But in the 90s, he didn't do that. And then come the tournament, they were mentally and physically done. And they wanted no part of winning. A number of players told me that in the 90s, when the NCAA tournament would come, probably the greatest three weeks in sports for people who love basketball, we didn't care if we lost. Yeah, we wanted to win. But if we lost,

we knew we didn't have to go to practice the next day. So the silver lining in losing was the season's over and I don't have to listen to that again. And that's why you saw him lose often in the first and second round, in my opinion. You make a really important point here, which is there's this view that Knight is this guy who places the importance of the team at the highest level. But I think you hit the nail on the head. I think this was really about his ego. And I think that whether that was something that changed from the 80s into the 90s, I can't speak to that, of course, perhaps nobody can. But I think a lot of people who give off this

aura of team first, team first, team first are really quite ego-driven when you really get underneath the surface. And that's a great example. There are times when I find myself doing the same thing. There are times when I find myself being so ego-focused, so focused on myself that I sort of lose sight of what the purpose is with respect to others. And if you stay in that state for a very long period of time, it's a bad place to be. You're going to behave badly. And the other point you make is that really he had lost all sense of checks and balances. There was nobody in that guy's orbit that could offer any sense of sanity. Do you have any sense, by the way, of what his private life was like? Because it's one thing

for a group of 20 year olds who worship you to show up and take that type of abuse. But do we have any sense of what his personal relationships were like with friends, with family? And was he able to sort of put some sort of restraint in place with respect to his anger in that setting? Do you have any indication of that? The only indication I have is he was divorced once previously. When I started doing, again, after I spoke to Neil Reed, after I flew up to Indiana at first and did a basic kind of round of interviews to get a sense in the lay of the land. Literally, I backed up all

the way to Army and started talking to people who knew him there, why he left there. It didn't point to what my assignment was, was why did three players leave in the last two years, but I wanted to get a sense of that. I wanted to understand him from head to toe. At one point, I got a phone call and was put in touch with a professor at the school who on background, he has since passed away so I can share it. At the time, he was on a hunting trip with Coach Knight in Argentina. And he said, I don't want to go public, but I just want to make you aware that I was there in a hunting lodge with he and his son and Coach Knight got in a fight with his son, and I don't have my notes in front of me. I don't know if he dislocated his shoulder and bloodied his nose, but

it wasn't pleasant. The professor told me, described it to a T, of what took place. At the time, I had done my reporting and CNN had done our initial report. It was a 16-minute piece alleging the three things that Neil had told me, that Coach Knight had grabbed him by the throat, he'd kicked the president out of practice, and he had brandished soiled toilet paper. So it's front page news around the country. Everybody's attacking CNN, me, Neil Reed, anybody in the piece. And so I start getting phone calls from people.

I'm put in touch with this professor who said, hey, I don't want to go public, but I want you to know what I know. And again, much like Neil, he told me everything. And I went to my bosses and said, I got to fly to Argentina to find out if this is true. And we didn't have huge budgets at CNN Sports at the time. We were getting attacked as if we were going after night. So my bosses said, hey, just we can't go down there. We can't make it look like we're out to get him. And I go, I'm not out to get him, but people are calling me.

So I kind of went around my bosses a little bit and called a stringer. A stringer is in the news businesses. We have contacts at different places, countries, cities, towns around the world that aren't on our staff. But if we hire them for the day, they'll do work for us. So I found out a stringer for CNN and I called. I said, can you go over to this hunting lodge and can you talk to this person? Here's the phone number,

this, this, this. And the stringer came back and said, he confirmed what happened. He runs a very high end lodge. He doesn't want to bad mouth his very wealthy clients, but he did confirm to me that he drove them to the hospital and said to Coach Knight, you're no longer welcome here. And that really, to me, you talked about the tip of the iceberg or what we see. You asked me about his private life. And I'm like, that was evidence to me that he couldn't control his temper in his private life. And I wanted to report it. I had two different people who wouldn't go on the record or confirm it with me at the time. So I couldn't. As a journalist, I can't report it because I can't definitively confirm it. So what did I do? I called Christopher Simpson. Christopher Simpson was Miles Brand's right-hand man. He was the vice president of kind of media communications and he was the voice of Indiana University for Miles Brand. So I'm like, well, at least I'll let him know that I know. So I start poking as a journalist, poking and prodding and people. I'll never forget. It was the day where they would ultimately announce zero tolerance. And I may be getting ahead of the story, but I'm on the phone with him. And I said

to Christopher Simpson, I said, if Coach Knight can't control his temper so much so that he would harm his own son, how can you as a representative of this university ensure that if mothers and fathers around the country are going to send their sons to play for him, that they're not going to be safe. And I was appalled at his answer. I was walking on the sidewalk outside of the, it was the center in Indianapolis where they're going to have the press conference. And I remember pacing up and down the sidewalk and he said, Robert, that has nothing to do with his coaching. And I about jumped through the phone at him. And I said, how can you not see the connection and the correlation? He can't control his temper and will do that to one of his sons. How can you ensure that kids who come here to

play are going to be protected? We went back and forth at it that day, but that gave you a sense of where the university was in trying to do damage control and protect them. So what ultimately gave you and the senior leadership at CNN the confidence to publish the story? And when was that? So 99, you start looking at this, how long did it take and how much digging did you need to do before you were willing to write this? And I don't want to give the story away, but there's a tape in here somewhere. And I can't remember if the tape came before or after the publication of the piece. I'll back up to April of 99 is when I get called into Steve's office. Luke record just left the third player in two and a half years to be gone. Talked to

Neil that Sunday night, several days later, fly up to Indiana. And literally for the next nine months or more, I'm reporting it. And other than peripheral people, no one's going on camera. No one wants to speak out against Coach Knight. And as I said in the film, I could hear and feel the fear in their voices as I spoke to them. And that's something that fascinated me as a journalist. I'm like, why are they so afraid of this guy? Why will they tell me everything on background or off the record or maybe on the record, but not for attribution, which means you can use what they say, but not tie their name to it. That drove me. That actually drove me for a long period of time. I said, there's something here and I have to be patient.

And I have to give Steve Robinson, my boss credit because I did a lot of different things during this nine months, but he allowed me to pursue this story at my tempo because I knew if I called you, Peter, and you told me a lot of things, and then I give you the full court press a week later trying to get you on camera, you're probably going to say no. I had to play and develop a relationship with each individual, and they're all different. So I had to kind of keep everybody on the hook until I could start getting, I knew if I got one person on camera, I could probably get the second. If I got two, I could get the third. And if I got three, I could get five, but who was

going to be the first? So I interviewed professor Murray Sperber. I interviewed other people in and around campus. And I basically, to be honest, I had the story the first night I called Neil Reed. Those three things became the backbone of the story. I just had to confirm it. So you asked earlier, at one point early on, I called Luke Recker, would not speak with me. And even speak with you on background? No. Nothing at all? No, no.

And what about Collier? I spoke to Luke's mother on background. And I spoke to others who told me that Luke wanted to quit after his freshman year. And he and his mother went in to speak to Coach Knight about, hey, he doesn't want to play here anymore. And Coach Knight basically said, I'll change, I'll change, I'll change. I understand. I'll change. I don't want to lose him. And so Luke decided to stay.

And year two, nothing changed. So at the end of year two, Luke wants out. So I had a sense of his story through other players, through his mother. And then I call Collier. And I was based in Atlanta at CNN, in downtown Atlanta at the CNN Center. For anybody who knows Atlanta, Georgia Tech's two miles away, three miles away. So I get his number and I call him. And he, as I say in the film, he's like, no, no, not interested, not interested, not interested. And as an investigative

reporter, you just don't want them to hang up. Because if I can keep them on the phone for two minutes, I can keep them on for five. And you can't keep them on for 10 unless you can keep them on for three. So you just try to tread water. And I was like, well, how about background? I'm right up the road. Let's grab a cup of coffee. I'll take you out to dinner. I'm just trying anything to get him to say, okay, I'll talk to you. And he was no, no, no, no, no. And I just, I said, Jason, I'm not going to put your name out there. I'm just trying to understand what it's like to play for Coach Knight. And he goes, you know what it's like to play for Coach Knight? And I had heard this a number of times before, and usually it would lead to an hour conversation. So I'm like, oh, I've broken through. And he goes,

go rent Full Metal Jacket. And then he hung up on me. And for those of you who haven't watched Full Metal Jacket, it's about an army recruit, someone in the military, and they have a drill sergeant that is just relentless on them. And the army recruit goes crazy, kills himself, kills the drill sergeant. And so I had seen the movie, but right after Luke said that, I was taken back because he hung up the phone and I went I think it was to Blockbuster still existed back then rented the movie brought it home and watched it again to try to understand what he was talking about and That was the extent of my conversation with Jason Collier You want to know what it's like to play for Coach Knight rent full metal jacket? So I did I now knew that Jason wouldn't speak with me.

Luke wouldn't speak with me for now. So I started going through the roster that year. And I started trying to track down Charlie Miller. He was Neil Reed's roommate at one time. He was a guard, kid out of Miami. And it took me forever to track him down. I called Miami, made a number of phone calls down there. I heard he was playing in

Sweden and Finland and started calling teams over there. And all of a sudden, I can't even remember how I found out, but I heard he was in Chicago. And I tracked him down and he said, yeah, I'll talk to you. And that was a huge breakthrough for me because he went on camera. First, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes of the interview, he told me how much he loved Coach Knight. He had the respect for Coach Knight. Coach Knight gave him an opportunity. Other people didn't. He was just praising Coach Knight. And then I asked him about Neil Reed and why he left. And he said, yes, he did put his hand around Neil's throat. I don't think he should have. Do I think he choked him? No, but I don't think he should have done it. So he confirmed that there was physical contact and he did it on camera.

And that was a huge breakthrough for me when I got Charlie Miller on camera. And once I got Charlie, I was hoping, pretty confident that the dominoes would start to fall. That once, you know, I could go back to Neil and say, hey, Charlie Miller confirmed what you said. So you're not going to be out there by yourself. And I had called Richard Mandeville, who I mentioned earlier. He had played for Knight for five years.

And I had spoken back and forth with him a number of times, and he said, no, I'm not interested, blah, blah, blah. And I came back and I said, hey, I spoke to Charlie Miller. I spoke to Neil Reed. Would you now go on camera? And then he sat on camera, and so did Neil Reed. So those are the three players that I got to Neil Reed, would you now go on camera? And then he sat on camera and so did Neil Reed. So those are the three players that I got to go on camera. You know, it's probably worth pausing for a moment because I'm sure the listener is sort

of sitting here wondering, what is it about Bobby Knight that's so interesting to me, right? On this podcast. I think the reason, and I don't even know if I really explained this to you, Robert, when I reached out to you, but I'm a perfectionist and I've been that way as long as I've had any sort of conscious awareness of anything. I mean, my mother tells stories about me as a kid doing things that my siblings didn't do as far as just being such a perfectionist. And also I've had a terrible temper my entire life. Again, one of those things that I didn't know how to explain it, especially because neither of my parents have a bad temper and neither of my siblings have a bad temper. So it's always this sort of weird thing. Like if I'm five years old and I was building a big Lego tower and it

broke, I'd smash it into a million pieces. I mean, I was just utterly pissed off beyond words when I couldn't do something perfectly. My guess is there are probably a lot of people listening to this who can relate to that because that phenotype can lead to some pretty good accomplishments, right? You can become pretty good at sports. You can do really well in school. You can do really well professionally, but it comes at a great cost. And I think now that I'm older, I'm becoming more and more and more aware of that cost. So much so that in the past year, one of the biggest kind of breakthroughs I've had in therapy, which was very difficult, I consider it the single biggest step function I've ever experienced in my life, was becoming aware enough of my inner sort of monologue, not dialogue, but monologue with myself. sort of monologue, not dialogue, but monologue with myself. And I was actually going through my journal because journaling is a pretty big part of what I sort of do to kind of keep track of myself. I came across a sort of an entry from maybe seven months ago where my therapist said

something to the effect of, look, your lack of self-compassion is really extreme. I want you to sort of personify that entity inside of your brain that is constantly berating you. I want you to become more aware of it and I want you to actually give it an identity. And without hesitation, the identity was Bobby Knight and that assumed the name. So now in the journal, I could refer to Bobby Knight and what Bobby Knight says to me. Luckily, I've been meditating for a number of years and meditation gives you enough of a pause or at least an awareness of the inner voice. So now I just had to listen for it. And it was really shocking what it would say over some of the most trivial things. People who listen to this podcast probably aware, like I love archery. I love, you know, race car driving,

all these things, even a mistake in one of those things, which are completely inconsequential, right? I'm not a professional, anything like I do these things as a pure hobby, but just what I would say to myself when I make a mistake, It would never be, oh, try again better, you know, do it better the next time. It would be, you fucking idiot. You are so bad at this. How dare you practice this hard and still be this shitty? I mean, what is wrong with you? Can you imagine being this bad at something and caring as much as you do? Talk about it. And it was just this never ending insult. And so this idea expanded into something of how we're all made up of these different pieces of our personality. You have sort of the child in you, you have this

adaptive child, you have this entity that's trying to become a functional adult. But unfortunately, what I realized was, hey, the chairman of my board is Bobby Knight. And it's going to be really hard for me to make progress in life when the chairman of the board inside of my head is Bobby Knight. And somehow seeing your documentary is, I think, what allowed me to come up with this idea, you know, again, be able to put a name and a face to it and a character so that I could literally picture Bobby Knight in my head, screaming at me every time I made mistakes. And that was step one. But then step two was learning to offer an alternative explanation, which was basically my way of saying, you're no longer the chairman of the board. Thank you very much. In fact, you can leave the boardroom now. Now you're still going to be knocking and you're going to be very

loud for very long. We're going to a place where you're not allowed to talk to me that way. And eventually when you stop talking to me that way, I'm going to stop talking to others that way. I'm going to stop talking to myself that way and all those other things. So I throw that interjection in because I want people to understand like where my fascination comes from with this, because I just don't believe I'm alone in this. And while Bobby Knight may be one of the most extreme examples of the outward manifestation of this, I suspect there are many people who can relate to that inner critic that is brutal and this sort of lack of compassion we can have for ourselves. Fascinating to me because there's a number of similarities and words that jumped out to me

that make what you just talked about so connected to Coach Knight. The similarities are you talked about a Lego tower and you would explode. There were stories of Coach Knight, he read every book in the library when he was a kid, supposedly, and he'd play board games with his grandmother and she'd let him win because if he didn't, he'd throw a fit. And the first thing that came to my mind is that story when you're telling me your story. So the similarities and the connective tissue and you using him as a character and a name to define it, he's a perfectionist. Like you said, he has a terrible

temper. That's actually was his greatest undoing is his temper. I, to an extent, have some of those character traits so I could understand Coach Knight. My dad was great, but he was a direct communicator who would yell and it would be tough. I knew he loved me. So it wasn't, didn't go that deep into me. I get frustrated quickly when things aren't perfect, when things don't work out well. I can have a temper. I'm a perfectionist. I could understand Coach Knight at a level. The one word that you used that jumped out to me a number of times was awareness. The awareness you've come to realize is powerful. And if you're not aware of it, you can't help yourself or help solve it. And when you said that, I wrote down that a story came to mind. I interviewed Dave Kindred.

When I did my film, I didn't want to interview night haters or people who love Knight. I wanted to interview people who had known him for a long, long time and knew the good side and the bad side, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And Dave Kindred, longtime journalist at the Atlantic Constitution, I think USA Today, he's known him since the early 70s. And he told me a story where he attended a basketball game in the mid 70s, Indiana versus Kentucky. It was a famous game where Coach Knight and Joe B. Hall kind of met at midcourt on the sidelines and Knight kind of cuffed him on the back of the head. There was a photo of it. It was a big deal. And Dave Kindred kept asking Knight about it in the press conference and Knight would not answer it and got angry and got frustrated. And so Kindred leaves the press conference and he goes to write his story. So he goes back out onto the court where Press Row is and he's writing his story with a couple of other writers. And here comes Knight walking across the court. And Kindred looked at the other sportswriters and said,

this isn't going to go well. This looks like trouble. Not in a bad way, but just observationally. And he said Knight sat down with him and he said, how do I get myself into these situations? And he went on to tell how he and Coach Knight, he's like, how does this keep happening to me? Which led me to believe that Coach Knight, he's like, how does this keep happening to me? Which led me to believe

that Coach Knight had an awareness of his flaws as early as the mid-70s. Unlike you, he didn't try to address them, maybe tried to and just couldn't. But that story I found fascinating. It didn't fit into my reporting because my reporting was on the teens and the 90s, why those three guys left. But it was a story that never made the film never made everything but really told me a lot about knight that he very early on knew that there was something in his nature and his character and that he had a temper and that he would keep putting himself in situations that maybe after they were over he'd look back and and go, why the hell did I do that? But he never got it under control. And it ultimately led to his downfall

25 years later, but he was aware of it. I interviewed an amazing therapist named Terry real for the podcast. And we've spoken a lot about this idea of the anesthetic that is anger. So anger is actually kind of an interesting emotion because in the short run, it is actually quite anesthetizing. It overcomes a lot of the inadequacy that underpins it. Inside there's a hollowness. I think there's a void that needs to be filled. There's a grandiosity that stands in the place of a true inner strength. The anger kind of fills that void and numbs that pain in the short run, but it's immediately followed by quite a bit of shame. If you're any reasonably sane human being, which is to say you do not have true

psychopathology, you have to feel shame after these outbursts. There's no way that Knight isn't screaming at his players every single day and shoving toilet paper with shit in their face and leaving the locker room thinking, I'm a great guy. No, he's feeling ashamed of what he's doing. And as a result of that, he's beating himself up more and it's creating this greater and greater vicious cycle of needing greater grandiosity to overcome that shame, which leads to more outbursts of anger. That's a very difficult cycle to break. And I don't say that to make an excuse for him in any way, shape or form, or frankly,

to make excuses for me in times when I've found myself on those roller coasters. But I can just say from personal experience and from observational experience of countless people, it's hard to break that cycle without somebody else to help you do so. You really need a person who can challenge you and push you, or sometimes you need a devastating crisis. I trained in surgery and I knew people that I trained with whose anger was so bad that they got into real trouble. Basically became an existential crisis, a threat to their career. If you don't get your anger under control, it will threaten your career. So my guess is it's just a combination of all of these things. In that sense, he became

a victim of his success. His success kept him far enough away from crisis that there probably wasn't enough impetus to change until it was too late. You're exactly right. And for people who didn't see my original reporting on CNN or the film, that crisis, I'll back up to April of 99, the following college basketball season, I released my first story. And it has Neil Reed, Charlie Miller, Richard Mandeville, a number of other people. and they make those three allegations. He kicked the president out of practice. He brandished soiled toilet paper, and he grabbed Neil Reid by the throat, chokes Neil Reid.

So those are the allegations in the 16 minutes. Indiana rallies the troops. Everybody says it's not true, and we can go back to it in a minute, but I'm going to jump to the crisis. So I do that first piece. I do a second piece and we can talk about it in a minute where I actually get the videotape that's proof that he grabbed Neil Reed by the throat and that changed the entire narrative of the nationwide story. Explain for a moment how that makes it to you. Because that's, I mean, look at this point, people who haven't seen the documentary, I hope are going to see the documentary because it's very powerful for reasons we haven't even got to yet, by the way.

That changes the game. And it's out of a movie, how this tape makes it to you. I do my first 16 minute story making those three allegations. Indiana, all the players, the university, everyone, even people in the media push back and say, it's factually not true. CNN's out to get him. A lot of it wasn't directed at me or I didn't pay attention, but it was directed at Neil Reed, anybody in the piece and CNN in particular. Once I had heard almost immediately, almost a year before when I heard about the choke, I was told that a tape exists of it because Indiana tapes all their basketball practices. They have student managers up in the stands on the sidelines and they videotape it. And Coach Knight analyzes it

at night, has his assistant coaches analyze it, shows it to the players. It's just part of their process. So if something happened on that court, chances are it was captured on video. I had heard about it forever. And it's just, I don't know, it's my style as a reporter that I never want to ask for something if the percentages are that the answer would be no. So I didn't pursue the video because I thought if I pushed or asked about it, much like I said, if I was talking to you, Peter, and tried to push you to go on camera and I got a no, then where do I go from there? I work every one of my sources, how I feel I can best connect with them, gain their trust, whatever. So I had heard about the video. I was in Indianapolis to do a site survey for the final four. It was going to be in the final four that year. And I made the rounds with a number of

my sources at the school. And I went out and had lunch and a few beers with one of them and a source invited me back to their home and I kind of knew what may or may not happen but I never let on and somebody goes, hey, I want to show you something. I'm like, oh, what do you want to show me? And so I saw the tape of practice from high above, Coach Knight going towards Neil Reed, Neil Reed's head snapping back. And even in that moment, I didn't ask for the tape. I didn't ask for it. And people who are listening to this may say, how the hell do you not ask for it? Are you an idiot? Are you a moron? Because for a month now, CNN's under fire or my reporting's under fire. I just, I wasn't sure that the answer would be yes

here. I'm proud because I've been in this business for 33, 34 years and I've tried my hardest and I'm not perfect, but I try not to use people. I try not to use people to get something. And I think because it took me almost a year to report this, people got that sense with me who would, the more I talked to somebody and it's not on the front page or it's not in the news, the more they trusted me. So what would they do? The more they would tell me, the more they would tell their friend, you can trust this guy. Oh, you should call this guy. Oh, you have something you should call Robert. That's how I got everything I got in this story. So in that moment where I watched the video that kind of vindicate my reporting and shut up all the critics, I didn't ask for it.

And it was just an instinct of mine. A number of days later, I remember it vividly. We were watching an episode of The Sopranos, my wife and I, and the phone rings and it's my contact talking about some stuff that was going on and I said, ah, just send me the tape. I won't use it until you get a lawyer. And so I made a deal with that person in the moment. Actually, to be honest, let me back up. I had a conversation. I said, let me call you back.

I called Lester Munson, who people may know from ESPN. I hired him at ESPN. He used to be, he's a lawyer. He was an investigative producer for Sports Illustrated, somebody I'd worked with at CNNSI. I had the utmost respect. I go, if there's anybody I can trust, it's Lester. He's a lawyer.

I said, hey, Lester, here's the situation. I may be coming into possession of a tape that may or may not be perceived as stolen by somebody. I want to make sure I don't do anything incorrectly and how I get it, blah, blah, blah. He gave me some great advice. The tape shows up at my house a number of days later. It's vindication for all my reporting. From the time you get the tape until the tape is made public is how long? You gave the university a heads up first, right? Because they had dug their heels in and said, you guys are wrong. Yeah, they had dug their heels in. Everybody was attacking Neil, CNN, me, anybody in the piece. That Monday, I'm at Augusta National for the Masters. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm doing all the pre-story coverage for the Masters. But because this night thing is a number

of weeks before our first piece had aired, I was kind of scheduled to leave the Masters and come back. I come back on a Wednesday and the tape had arrived in my mailbox. I knew what it was. and the tape had arrived in my mailbox. I knew what it was. I popped it in, but I didn't really even have to look at it. But I actually didn't tell my bosses I had it. And people may wonder why, because I had given someone my word that I wouldn't run it until the person got legal advice and called me back.

And I trust Steve Robinson and Jim Walton with my life. Those are my two immediate bosses. I worked for Jim for 14 years and Steve quarterbacked this whole investigation with me. We're literally the only two people who were involved. There was no reporter, no nothing. At the end, we had an editor that put it together, but it was just Steve and I. So I trusted them impeccably, but I didn't know if somebody up the food chain would say, we have that tape, CNN's under fire, we're running it. I never wanted anybody to say that I lied to them and that I used them. So the only way to prevent that from happening and probably being in complete control, whereas a producer, I am much of a control freak. I didn't

tell my bosses I had it. That's Wednesday, Thursday, Friday morning, I get a phone call. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was walking down the hall of my house. The phone rings and I pick it up and I can tell them on speakerphone and I hear, this is so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so. And it's a law firm, a bunch of names. And I'm like, ah, here's the moment of truth. Did I make the right decision or the wrong decision? Because I'm in possession of a tape that vindicates my reporting. But if this phone call goes in another direction and I keep my word, I may never be able to show it. But my instincts told me I was doing the right thing. So there's this long conversation back and forth. And I explained,

here's how I think it'll all go down. I kind of convinced the people on the phone call that the best thing to do is let me air the tape. So I go into the office later that day and I walk into Steve's office and I say, I got the tape. And he's like, what? Rick Davis, he's the head of standards and practices at CNN, had been there probably close to 40 years. He's still there. I did with him for the film. He's like, we got the tape. Like he's so freaked out that we had it. So I bring Steve, the head of sports, Jim Walton, who later became the president of CNN into a room, shut the door and I play it for him. And I remember Steve going, holy shit. And I remember Jim, who was the president of sports would go on to be the president of the network. He just looked at me and he said, you know, if you did that at CNN, you'd be fired immediately. And we discussed what should happen. And they said, hey, you got to start working on a second piece. And we want to air it Monday. This is Friday afternoon. So I'm sitting there going, OK.

So Saturday, I'm starting to think about how I'm going to put together this follow up piece to my original 16 minute piece. I had just been at Augusta National on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and for those who are not members of the media, which is 99.9% of the people listening to this, when you cover Augusta, you can drop your name. Back then, it was like into a fishbowl in the media center, and they'd pick 20 names out of that bowl who could play the course Monday morning after the tournament was over. I'm starting to put together this piece on Saturday and I get a phone call from my colleagues and my best friends who are covering the event and they go, dude, they drew your name. You got a tee time at Augusta National

nine o'clock Monday. So I have to call my boss and say, I know you want this piece on Monday, but please, for the love of God, can I play Augusta and can we air it on Tuesday? please, for the love of God, can I play Augusta and can we air it on Tuesday? And my bosses were so good, they said yes. But I hope people understand why I didn't tell my immediate bosses, because I didn't want somebody to overrule their decision. And I never wanted anybody who placed their trust in me to think I fucked them. And the only way I could ensure that 100% was to hold the tape and not let anybody know I had it. So we air the piece. I put together the piece on Tuesday when I get back. We're going to air it on Wednesday or Thursday. I think we were going to air it on Thursday. My bosses say we have to call Indiana. So I've been reporting this story for almost a year. My bosses say, in order to be fair

journalists, we have to give them a chance to respond. I had been battling them for nine months to a year. And I go, we don't owe them anything. They should see it like the rest of the world. Like I wanted to throw a haymaker and just have them watch it on TV like everyone else. And to Rick Davis's credit, Jim Walton's credit, and Steve Robinson's credit, they push back, push back, push back and say, no, to be honorable journalists, to be fair, we have to give them a chance to respond. So they called Indiana. And I kept saying, I don't think this is a good idea. And I said, what if they slap an injunction on us for having stolen property? Then we may be in possession of a tape that we can't air.

So there's back and forth between us and they're all my bosses, so they're going to win. I knew they'd win, but I just kept presenting a front. Plus it was probably personal frustration of all of the roadblocks and hurdles that Christopher Simpson specifically and the lies he had said to me over the nine months, 10 months of my reporting, or now it was over a year actually, of my reporting that I didn't think we owed them anything. So we call them and four individuals get on two private planes,

three come out of Bloomington, one was on vacation in Key West and gets on a private plane, the president of the board of trustees and they all come to Atlanta. When I had gotten the tape, I arranged to have Neil Reed fly into Atlanta to view the tape to verify it. So Neil flies into Atlanta. I watch the tape with him. I take him into his studio. I play the tape with him. He has a microphone on. I'm interviewing him while it's playing. Probably do 40 minutes of an interview with him, watch it over and over again, talk to him about it. I need to get Neil Reed out of CNN Center because the four

Indiana Board of Trustees and vice presidents are on their way in. They probably passed on I-85 coming to the airport and from the airport. About 40 minutes after I put Neil in a cab, sent him back to the airport, they arrive. Did Neil come by himself? No, he did come by himself. I called Neil and I said, I have something you may be interested in seeing. There's a ticket waiting for you. I'll have a ticket waiting for you. I'll have a car waiting for you. So we paid for him to come to CNN, but he came by himself. And I had spent nine months with Neil. I had talked to him over those

nine months before the initial report had come out. Now it was another month later. I had talked to him probably a couple of times a week. Sometimes it was just, we were just shooting the breeze. And Neil later did an interview with ESPN for another project about it. And he told them, yeah, Robert and I became friends. We just started talking. And that's my style. If you're real with people and they trust you, they'll tell you anything. And Neil told me everything. And I never reported. I never hung him out to dry. I never betrayed his confidence in me. In fact, when I got married during this whole time and I went on my honeymoon with my wife to Turkey and then like a cruise through the Greek islands. And I called Neil before that. And

then I called him from my honeymoon to say, hey, I'm in Europe. He was playing in Holland at the time. I go, can I come by and interview you? This is before the first piece aired. So he and I had talked forever. So when I called him and said, will you come here? He would kind of almost do anything I asked him to. So he came and watched it. And then 40 minutes later, the Indiana, two members of the board of trustees and two vice presidents of the school, including Christopher Simpson, came to CNN center to watch the tape. What was their reaction? As I had predicted to my bosses, but they didn't believe me at the time, I said, you can't trust them, specifically Christopher Simpson. So we literally

go into a conference room. It's Frederick Eichhorn, who used to be the president of the Indiana Bar Association, John Walda, who's the president of the board of trustees, Christopher Simpson, and Terry Klapex, who's a vice president of Versailles, the athletic department. The reason I thought they may slap an injunction on us is because Frederick Eichhorn was the head. He was the head of the Indiana State Bar Association at one point. So I knew he's a lawyer. They may try to legally stop us from doing anything. So when we sat down, it's myself, Steve Robinson, my immediate boss, and Jim Walton, the president of sports, on the opposite side of the table of these four.

And literally, as our butts hit the chair on our side of the table, Christopher Simpson, Miles Brand's right-hand man, says, we understand you're in possession of stolen property that belongs to Indiana University, and we want it returned immediately. I was like, holy shit, you have balls coming into our office and fucking dropping that bomb. And I kind of looked at my bosses and I was at just glance, I was kind of like, now you know what I've been dealing with for the last year. For me, I was like, you didn't believe me. And I'm not going to be able to paint a picture of how powerful the next 20 seconds was. But without missing a beat, because literally he dropped a nuclear bomb in the room that normally would have put 99.9% of the people on the defensive.

Steve Robinson, my immediate boss, without missing a beat, there was just a breath of silence. And he said, and I'm not going to do it justice, but in the most even keeled, emotionless tone, just said something to the effect of, well, I'm disappointed that you would come in here and say that. We were kind enough to invite you down to view this tape. If you'd like to pursue legal action, we'll escort you out the door to the bank of elevators outside. I'll push the button for the 13th floor and you can speak to our legal department. But before the door opens on the 13th floor, this tape will be on CNN, CNN International Headline News. We'll send it out to 300 affiliates around the country. Now, did you come here to threaten us or would you like to watch the tape? In my 34 years of being a journalist, I've never

seen a more powerful moment by someone I worked with. I mean, Christopher Simpson came in with a lot of balls. And my boss, literally, there was just a breath of air. And then he just surgically castrated him. And he just said, no, what would you like to do? And so then there was some conversations back and forth. I don't think they expected that answer for Steve. I looked at Steve with as much admiration as any journalist I ever did in that moment. I just went, wow. Like, how did he not get emotional? How did he not attack them? But he just surgically cut their legs out from under him, castrated him and said, do you want to watch the tape? And then there was some back and forth where Indiana's representatives, mostly Christopher Simpson said, well, we'd like to watch it in private. And at first Jim Walton said, sure, we don't have a problem

like that. And then I cleared my voice was like, and Jim looked at me and I just shook my head. And then we adjourned for a second and Steve, Jim, and I walked out and I go, I don't trust him. And I said, oh, by the way, my source said, don't ever let anybody see the actual tape because it may give them a clue as to who shot it, where it came from, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I actually, I made dubs of the tape, but I was actually showing them the exact tape. So they couldn't say it was dubbed, altered or anything. I'm a journalist.

I'm like you, I'm a perfectionist. So I had the tape in a VCR. And so we walked back in and Jim, my boss said, hey, these are going to be the ground rules if you agree to them. You can watch the tape as many times as you want. What happens in this room is off the record. Robert will be in here with you and operate the machine,

but we're not going to let you watch it by yourself. So they agreed. And then I didn't think about it at the time. I'm 35 years old, I think, at this time. Jim and Steve leave the room. And I didn't think about it until years and years later when somebody asked me about it. And so I'm sitting in there.

Steve Delson, he's an investigative journalist. He worked for ESPN for years. He wrote a book and there was a chapter on this. And he said, Robert was left alone in a room with four men who wished he was never born. It was a great line. And I was like, I never thought of it until I read it in his book. It's the four of them and me. I had spent a year covering this. I knew everything that was going on at Indiana. I had the tape. I didn't think anything of it in the moment.

And once my bosses leave, one of them starts asking me, again, everything's off the record in this room. So one of them asked me, how many games have you been to? How many this? How many that? All he was trying to do, I am probably much like you. I'm a perfectionist. My mind races and works really, I make connections very, very quickly. And I'm like, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to find something that you can use to undermine my credibility to do the story.

And I just said, hey, everything in this room is off the record. Do you want to sit here and ask me a bunch of questions or do you want to watch the tape? And then Christopher Simpson said he wanted to see the tape. He was sitting across the conference table for me in this big room and he got up. You got to understand, I was frustrated that whole day because I didn't want him there. I had argued with my bosses, you shouldn't bring him here. Christopher Simpson's lied to me for a year. I didn't want him there. I had argued with my bosses, you shouldn't bring him here. Christopher Simpsons lied to me for a year. I don't trust him. Then they came in and dropped the bomb. So I'm sitting there going, I didn't want this situation to happen, kind of,

meaning I didn't want them there. I just wanted them to see it on the air. He gets up and he starts going towards the tape machine, which I had on the floor in the corner, like I was in between. I said, sit down. And he didn't, took another step or two. And I said, Mr. Simpson, sit the fuck down. I don't care what my bosses say. If you don't sit down right now, I'm going to unplug that machine, walk out to my car and drive back to my house. And you guys aren't going to see this tape. Did you come here to see the tape? Or did you come here to ask me questions? Did you come here to look at the tape? You're not going to see the tape sit down. You want me to do it. At that point, it's probably the only time I really lost my cool. It was like 10 seconds.

And I just told him to sit the fuck down because he was starting to piss me off, to be honest. I'm like, you don't come into my office and tell me how things are going to go down. And so he sat back down. I played the tape. They watched it a number of times. They didn't say anything. And even if they did, it was off the record, so I couldn't report it. And then we had made an agreement when Jim said you could watch the tape and then afterwards, Robert will interview one of you. So I played the tape for them. We adjourned the meeting. And then I went into a studio and interviewed John Walda. He was heading up the investigation by the school. He was the head of the board of trustees. I think for five weeks or so, he had been investigating it. As it states in my film, my first story came out

a month before John Walda, head of the board of trustees, was quoted in the Indianapolis Star saying, I put no stock in what Neil Reid says. If CNN's saying it, then I don't believe it. Something to that effect. So he's on the record saying he doesn't believe the guy. And then he's placed in charge of the investigation into the guy's allegations. So my first question to him was, you've now seen the tape, do you put any stock in what Neil Reid says? And John Waldo was really good, I got to give him credit.

He was a broken record of just saying, we've seen the tape, we're in the middle of an investigation, it's going to be part of our investigation. No matter what question I asked him, he gave me the same answer. You got to understand, for 10 months, I had been waiting to interview anyone from Indiana and hold him accountable. And so he started to frustrate me. I'd ask him, is that conduct you want your coaches at Indiana to do? We've seen the tape. We're taking it.

Part of it was just this broken record after about four times. I knew I was going to get nowhere. So then I got to be honest, it was just more of self-satisfaction for me because I kind of had him. So I kind of wanted to squeeze a little bit the balls. I was just, for the longest time, I wasn't, not proud of it, but I wondered if I crossed the line as a journalist. So I said, what do you say to people who want to send their sons to play for Bob Knight? Is that what's going to happen to

them? We're going to look at it. And so I asked a couple of personal things like to piss him off and prompt him. And ironically, I heard Christopher Simpson behind me say to my bosses, he can't ask that. And once I heard, I got a reaction out of him to my bosses, he can't ask that. And once I heard I got a reaction out of him, I was done with the interview. I asked about four more questions just to prolong the agony of him standing there. And then they left and we put the story on about two hours later where we had Neil watching it. We had the four members of Indiana University watching it. We did our follow upup piece and it was

front page news across the country. Everybody had a still of the grab. Everybody had it, but it was a pretty eventful day having Neil Reed come in and leave, having them come in and leave and having to turn the story around in about an hour or two after that. How long would it be after that before you realized what you missed the first time, which was when you sat down with Neil and Neil watched the video with you? You comment on this. I think it's actually the most powerful part of the documentary, but I don't recall how long after you realized what you sort of missed that first time. It's certainly understandable why you would have missed it. There was a lot going on that day. It was getting Neil in, getting Neil out, getting the bozos from Indiana in, getting

the bozos from Indiana out, getting the story out, the legal stuff, the heated emotions, a million things going on. But the human tragedy of this is a guy, Reed, has to sit down and watch over and over and over again, one of the most traumatic experiences of his life. And for anybody listening to this, who's suffered trauma, it's bad enough once. And for most people, they never have to see it again or have a visceral reminder of it again. And yet Neil had to watch it over and over and over again. You noticed that later. and over and over again. You noticed that later. I noticed it immediately. I had spoken to Neil for 10 months. To be honest, he had probably told me things that he had probably never told anyone else. Like that's how close we were with regards to this incident, this moment. There's things he

can or can't tell his parents. he didn't really speak to other teammates once he left indiana he had no contact really with any of them in the moment i knew how difficult it was for him in the moment i knew how much he trusted me i knew how far i could push him maybe the right wrong word but dig and pull it out of him I knew in the moment how painful it was for him. But sadly, the focus of that day, and to answer your question, probably 15 or 16 years later until I really, I truly, honestly noticed how I fucked up or what I didn't do. You have to understand as a journalist, you have to be impartial. I can't be Neil Reed's friend. I have to report the story. But in order for him to trust me, I have to spend a lot of time and have this trust. He would tell me anything and everything.

So when the first story comes out and he's under fire, I spoke to him for a month after that. And then when he comes back in and watches it, the purpose of that second story was to say, we did a first story where this young man alleged these three things and everybody said it's factually incorrect. Oh, by the way, it was correct and here's why. You can see it for yourself. The trainer for Indiana University, after our first story came out, said, the choking thing never happened. You can give me a lie detector. It never happened. We lined up all the people who discounted our original story. And our second story, as I say in the film,

just focused on the journalism of was what we reported right and was what Neil Reed initially said to us, was it factually accurate? And that's what the second piece was. What I say in the film is I missed the human story sitting right in front of me. I didn't miss it. I knew it was there because I had developed a relationship with Neil. If I could turn back the clock 20 years or whatever, I probably would have done a follow-up piece with Neil several weeks, several months, whatever, later to say, what was this like personally? But the original story was about an investigation and a journalism to show wrongdoing. It was poo-pooed, denied, and attacked. The second piece was to say, no, it was factually accurate. The third piece I should have done was this was the damage it did to this young man.

And as I stayed in the film, Neil and I stayed in touch for a number of years after that. And I probably erred on the side of, in the moment, keeping him somewhat at arm's distance. There's this balancing act. If you get too close to story, you're going to make mistakes. If you become friends with the people in your story, your credibility is going to be questioned. And there's a fine line to walk. Looking back as a human being,

and that's why I devoted so much time to it in the film, is when I was asked to do this film, one of the first things I did is take out the box where I had all the materials from my reporting and I watched that. And Hilary Horgan, who was a producer on the film with me, she had worked with me a number of times at ESPN. I had hired her to work on shows I had done. She was in my office when I played it. She watched the 40 minutes and said, you could just hit play and watch that 40 minutes. I can't take my eyes off of it. She watched the 40 minutes and said, you could just hit play and watch that 40 minutes. I can't take my eyes off of it. To answer your question in a long roundabout way, that's really the moment

when I was in this office with Hillary and she watched it and she just said, oh my God, look at the trauma on him. Look at this. And that's why when I went to do the film, I showed everybody it. And I confess that I fucked up as a journalist. And I did the journalistic part of the story, but I missed the human story sitting right in front of me, which was Neil. It's just got the saddest ending in a way. I mean, it's sort of a bittersweet ending as you walk us through in the documentary, which is that Neil seems to go on and do okay.

I mean, he marries a wonderful woman. He has these great kids. He's coaching kids in high school playing basketball. He seems to be an amazing coach. The athletes love him. And he dies of a massive heart attack at the age of 36. You just couldn't script something like that. It's so tragic. And so while there's a part of me that thinks, how amazing is it that this guy who is so traumatized, so humiliated, manages to not pass that on to others? And that's a big deal. Most people who traumatize people are themselves traumatized. And he could be someone who stopped the cycle at such a young age is amazing to me. is amazing to me. And yet, I don't know, not knowing anything about him, I can't help but wonder, was he able to sort of reconcile all the horrible things that had happened? And why did he have to go so soon? I thought that was the most powerful thing. Again, as I look back, I saw so many things, 16, 17, 18 years later, as I put the film together and relived my reporting from long ago. And one of the more

powerful things to me was what happened that caused Neil Reed to leave Indiana. Took everything from him. He once told me, he said, Robert, I don't know what's worse, never having your dream come true or having your dream come true and it turning into a nightmare. And that's what happened to him, his whole being from probably six, seven, eight years old on. You can see him in the film in a Bob Knight basketball camp t-shirt when he's under 10. His whole life was to go there, play. He said it was an out-of-body experience for him to put on the candy stripe sweats at Indiana and run out onto Assembly Hall. So when it turned into a nightmare for him, he questioned his entire being and everything that his life had led to to that point. When Neil Reed left, Bob Knight didn't lose anything but a point

guard who he quickly replaced. He still had three national championships, an Olympic gold medal. He was still in the Hall of Fame. And yet all these years later, he never overcame Indiana firing him for that. And yet Neal was able to put it behind him. For 20 plus years, Knight wasn't able to put that firing behind him. He finally returned to Assembly Hall last year, but it took him 20 years to come back. So he held that grudge for 20 years, whereas Neal struggled for a number of years, Whereas Neil struggled for a number of years, but ultimately put it behind him. And the abused, as you point out, the abused didn't turn into the abuser. I went out to California to the high school where he was a teacher and a coach. He only coached basketball one year. He coached football.

He was mainly the golf team coach. And I talked to a number of students. I talked to the principal. I talked to the athletic director. In many ways, he was the Pied Piper at that school. He would walk through the courtyard and everybody would go, hey, coach, hey, coach, hey, coach. They said he had an infectious smile. And it was everything. I almost think Neil turned into everything he wanted Coach Knight to be and everything he wanted from Coach Knight while Neil was at Indiana. Everything he yearned for. And a number of the players have said that. A lot of the players I interviewed in the late 90s, to a man, they all said, I didn't have a relationship with coach off the basketball court. If you look back to the guys on his 75, 76 team, his 81 team, his 87 team,

many of them have had relationships over the years with him. I think that 90s era, because they didn't have the success, he turned on them and never let them get close enough to him. He turned on them and never let them get close enough to him. I think Neil became the coach that Bob Knight never became. Yeah, he's won three national championships, an Olympic gold medal, and he's in the Hall of Fame. But the kids at Pioneer Valley High School loved Neil Reed. And I'm not saying that because I'm biased or anything. I went out there and I was shocked by the emotion they still held for them.

I interviewed one student who said, he's been gone four years. I still have the last texts he sent me on my phone. I've never deleted them. It's a kid who's a golf pro. Neil helped him get a job. He played on the golf team for him. He said Neil was a Nike guy. He goes, every day I only wear Nike. So I have Neil, I have the Nike swoosh on my chest or my armor and my hat to remember how

I got here. It was Neil. There's all these stories that just blew me away as to the man he became before he passed away. And at such a young age, that's the part that just amazes me is to put yourself back together after all this. It's humbling. You sent me an email a month ago, maybe longer, and I couldn't believe you dug it up, which was the last tweet that Neil sent about 10 days before he died. Do you remember that? Yeah. Do you have it in front of you? Because I don't. I can recite it, but if you have the exact wording. I do. So it was six days after Jerry Sandusky was found guilty in the Penn State scandal, and it was 10 days before Neil died. He tweeted, I now realize that kids deserve to be punched, spit on, choked, and raped in the shower,

so a select few can be worshiped like gods. When I first started doing research for the film, I came across that and it literally took my breath away. I mean, I read it and read it and read it again because I found it on Twitter, on his Twitter account, and then I cross-referenced, like, when did he write this? And I went, oh my God, it was 10 days before he passed. And then I'm like, why the reference to rape in the shower? And then I Googled the timeline and I was like,

oh my God, that was right in the middle of the Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach, who's now spending the rest of his life in prison for taking advantage of young men. And one of them that was detailed in the court in the shower. And when I read that, what it told me is, and this is before I went out to Pioneer Valley High School in California to see what became of Neil Reed. I had stayed in touch with him for a number of years. I'm asked to do the film. I come up, I read this tweet and immediately I'm like, he died. A tortured human being is what that tweet kind of said to me. It never left him. It aided his mind. It aided his heart. It aided his soul. He never escaped what happened to him at Indiana. And yet when I went out to speak to his wife,

Kelly, I actually interviewed his two daughters, which was amazing. I didn't include it in the film out of respect for them, but it's something that Kelly will have forever, them talking about their father. I was amazed because I went out there having read that tweet. And when you read that tweet, what do you think of when you know Neil Reid's story? And that's what was in his mind and that he tweeted 10 days before his death. What comes to your mind? It's everything you said, which is

he is still, he still has PTSD. And yet when I went out there, that's what I was expecting to hear. I interviewed his best friends. I interviewed guys who were in the office with him and the athletic department. I interviewed all the kids. I interviewed guys who were in the office with him in the athletic department. I interviewed all the kids. I interviewed the principal. She said he worked here probably for three years before I even knew that was him. The kid who got choked. Kelly told a story, his wife, where they were wrestling around on the bed once. And she's like, he's so much bigger than me.

I kind of went up at him and just by where they were, her hands kind of went up and was kind of near his throat. And literally he just stopped and she didn't say turned white, but she noticed a distinctive change in him. And I included that in the film because it showed me that he did have PTSD and that moment never left him. Even where he's in a playful, loving moment with his wife, that flashback still came to him. I had seen the tweet, so I knew even 10 days before he died, it was still in his mind and his heart and his soul. And yet when I went out there, the story I uncovered was the exact opposite, that he had

kept it from everyone and he kept it locked up in a way. And even his best friends would say he rarely ever talked about it. He didn't bring anybody down. He didn't wallow in what had happened. He wanted to move on from it. And admirably he did. What do you think Knight's legacy is going to be? I mean, I guess just for posterity, we can finish the story somehow to the amazement of any sane person, despite having video evidence that Knight choked a player, which by extension effectively means every other allegation is true. Somehow this university and its infinite wisdom decides not to fire him. And instead, in arguably one of the top 10 acts of cowardice in the history of

at least the modern civilization, comes up with this goofy idea of, well, you get one more chance, but it's going to be under a zero tolerance umbrella. I don't think it took very long for him to violate his zero tolerance, right? It wasn't it later that year? It was in the fall of 2000 that he grabbed another kid's arm. And I don't even want to go into the story. It's so idiotic. But the point is it didn't take long for him to violate zero tolerance. He got fired. And I got to tell you, I hope that the kids that chanted his name and cursed the kid who got grabbed that ultimately led to his firing and all the best. Well, I hope those kids are able to watch the videos of themselves 20 years ago and at least have some, some degree of appropriate shame and

remorse for the way they behaved. He goes on to coach eight years, I think at Texas tech before retiring. And I don't know, he's done some commentary work on ESPN. Look, he's at the end of his life now. He's 80, at least to my eye. Doesn't look too healthy. What's his legacy? I think it's mixed. I think it's very mixed. I want to back up one thing because you spoke earlier about having a devastating crisis that kind of brings an awakening to someone. In a perfect world, my reporting of what happened, my getting the tape could have been that moment for Coach Knight. I'm an optimist. And at that point, as much as I had battled Indiana when they placed him under zero tolerance, which means if you do, you know, we're going to wipe the slate clean. You've been here 29 years. We don't want the faucet just to keep dripping of all these bad things you've done over the 29 years. We're turning it off. But if there's one

more drip, if there's one more outburst, you're gone. You would think that would have been the devastating crisis that would have given him an awareness that he had to get his temper under control and all these things. But it didn't. When he grabbed a student, that was a public violation or breaking of zero tolerance. I was getting phone calls almost immediately after zero tolerance of the ways he was breaking zero tolerance. He wasn't showing up to functions. I think what ended up happening with Coach Knight is he met with Miles Brand and kind of, for lack of a better term, begged and pleaded for his job.

Miles Brand gave him one last opportunity, partially, I believe, because what he had accomplished at the school and partially because he believes Indiana, the university system, was partially responsible for allowing it to happen. So how can the school allow it to happen forever and then all of a sudden say, you're out of here because of this? And again, as a journalist, I try not to take sides in it, but I see his thought process in giving him one last chance. And in a perfect Pollyannic world, he changes the people around him, keep them under control, and he breaks Dean Smith's record for all-time

wins at Indiana. And this is a learning experience for him. But it was anything but. Immediately after zero tolerance and keeping his job, he resented the people at the school. He resented from everything that everyone told me. He was like, how dare you humiliate me like this after everything I've done for the school for 29 years, winning national titles, graduating young men, winning an Olympic gold medal. Like, how dare you question me? And that's where it becomes about I and me and he's a bully and all that stuff. So this could have been that devastating crisis that you talked about earlier. The hope was that it would be, but immediately after it wasn't. I was getting phone calls. One of them I got that I talk about in the film was

that he was suspended for three games and had to pay a $30,000 fine. So he met with the head of the university council for the school, Dottie Frapwell, to decide what games he was going to sit out, how he was going to pay the fine, $5,000 out of six checks, however they were going to do it. I was told, he screamed and yelled at her, called her the C word, did this, this, this, this, this. And so I get a phone call that this happened. So I can't report it because I don't have two eyewitnesses as a journalist. Me, I like to have three or four verify it. So I can't report it.

So what do I do? I pick up the phone and I call Dottie Frapwell. And it was a great phone call because I don't know if it was her assistant, but whoever picked up the phone goes, Dottie Frapwell's office. I goes, Dottie there. Yeah, she's standing right here. May I ask who's calling? I go, Robert Abbott from CNN. May I ask what this is regard to? Oh, a meeting she had with Coach Knight. I'm put on hold. Dottie can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message? I said, yeah, have her call me. Here's the number. Because I don't know this is true. I've heard it, but I don't know as a journalist. I can't report it. I don't know if it's true.

My phone rang in less than a minute, and it was Christopher Simpson, vice president of the school. And I remember mouthing into the phone, you dumb mother blankety blank. How stupid are you? I wasn't sure it happened. like, how stupid are you? Like, I wasn't sure it happened. But the fact that he called me back within like 30 seconds, told me, yeah, now I'm pretty sure it happened. Now I got to find out if it did. And when he was ultimately fired, it was put in one of the reasons he was fired that exact moment he berated her, etc, etc. Which he denies, by the way, if you look at Jeremy Sharpe's interview with Knight, I mean, just pathological lying, just pathological lying, probably to the level of what a psychopath is capable of. Right.

Again, when I go back to what we talked about early, what fascinates me in a story is an onion. You can peel away layer of layer upon layer of the genius, the brilliance, the perfectionist that is Bob Knight. I will say this. I interviewed and spoke to a lot of players throughout his tenure there. And I can't think of one that was a punk. He recruited really, really quality individuals. I remember after my original reporting being how impressed the body of people I spoke to were. And I interviewed Angelo Pizzo. For those of you who don't know, he's a screenwriter.

He wrote the film Hoosiers, which is based on Milan basketball. Gene Hackman plays the role that was kind of fashion about Bob Knight. He also wrote the film Rudy, the Notre Dame kind of walk-on football player. I interviewed him, and the reason being is Hoosiers came out right before he won the 1987 National Championship. And Angelo told a great story about the Academy Awards. His film was up for, I think, two Academy Awards. Dennis Hopper was up for one. Sorry for the tangent, but it's an interesting story. So Angelo's an Indiana grad. And so is, I believe it's David Anspar's co-writer, producer,

whatever, they did the film. So it happens to be the Academy Awards are being played the night of the national championship game and Indiana wins and is now in the national championship game. So Angelo Pizzo has to decide, do I go to the Academy Awards where my film's up for two? I think it was up for Dennis Hopper and score, a musical score, something like that. Or do I stay home and watch my beloved Indiana? So there was a rehearsal for the Academy Awards and they gave Dennis Hopper like a Sony watchman. And they said, hey, when you're there for the rehearsal, can you turn on

the Sony watchman and see if you can get ABC or NBC, whatever the network is that's going to show the game the night before. So Hopper's in there for the rehearsals and he's like, there's no way, there's so much RF in this building, you'll never get a signal. So the two directors, writers, producers of the film stayed home to watch Indiana and didn't go to the Academy Awards. When Knight wins the national championship that night, he invites Angelo Pizzo to a practice. And Angelo tells me the story. He goes, I go into assembly hall. And like I told you, it's usually locked and you're not allowed in there. He's sitting way up high and he sees Knight looking at him.

And he's like, God, I felt so uncomfortable and awkward. Should I be here? And he's such a great storyteller. And he says he almost gets up to leave, but he stays. And then a trainer comes up to talk to him right at the end of practice. Coach Knight would like to meet you. He says he walks down to Coach Knight and they start talking. I liked your film, blah, blah, blah. He goes, what are you doing? He goes, why? He goes, I'm going on a recruiting trip and you're coming with me.

So he gets in a car with Coach Knight. I think they drive to Chicago or maybe they got on a private plane and then flew to Chicago. I forget. But he basically spends like the next 10 hours with Knight as he goes on a recruiting trip. And he said he talked about Russian history with Knight for like six straight hours. And the reason I bring this up is in many ways, Coach Knight is brilliant, a genius. He's, as only God can do, give some of us amazing gifts in one area and so many flaws in another. Pizzo talked about how smart he was. They jumped from topic to topic, mostly about Russian history. And he goes, I consider myself a Russian history buff. Knight blew me away with the stuff he knew. We rarely talked about basketball. And that's the genius

of Coach Knight, how well-read he was, how he can motivate people. But ultimately, like Icarus, he didn't understand his flaw and he flew too close to the sun. He couldn't control his temper. Dave Kindred, who I mentioned earlier, says in my film, he goes, he had an anger in him. I don't know where it came from or why it was there, but it never left him. And that was ultimately his undoing. Robert, the story is, it means so much to me on so many levels and it is a cautionary tale. Even though Knight is a very extreme example of this, I don't think I would have gone to the lengths to have this podcast with you if I didn't believe that others could benefit from sort of a deeper examination of this. The work you did on this was amazing. I'm so grateful you did it first and foremost for Neil.

I think you probably deserve at least some credit for the fact that even though Neil's life was taken too soon, he was validated. He got to spend that last 12 years of his life, the last decade of his life, knowing that what happened, hopefully he understood it wasn't his fault, which is easy to say because cognitively, of course, it wasn't his fault, but that's not always easy to understand as a victim. So first and foremost, I thank you for what you did for someone I've never met, but have great affection for, and obviously for the rest of us who have benefited immensely from such an unbelievable story. I owed it to Neil. It's as simple as that. I owed it to Neil. At one point, one of the cuts of the film, I got some feedback from ESPN and one executive said,

you need to cut that Neil Reed part down to maybe one minute. And I was kind of like over my dead body. It's what gives the film its heart and soul. I screwed up 16, 17 years before by not telling his story sooner. And I feel I owed it to him to make his story part of this film. Because when somebody trusts you like that, I'm working on another film now where that trust is almost even greater for the situation the person I'm going to profile is in. It's a weight. It's a weight on you. And as a journalist, you don't want to let that compromise your objectivity. I think as a 35-year-old journalist at the time, I think I kept Neil possibly too much at a distance, not personally, but at least to the

rest of the world. I felt like if I did a story then, I was doing it because I knew him, not because we were friends. I was just like, I got to be careful. I got to be careful. And I'm angry with myself because I was too careful. And by doing this film, at least I told Neil people who the real Neil Reed was, who the Neil Reed I came to know was. And as I say at the end, thank you for trusting me to tell your story. That's what was the most important thing in the last days of Knight to me, is the ending. And that's what gave the film the heart and soul of it. It is about Bob Knight, but it's not about Bob Knight.

It could be about a local sheriff. It could be about the president. It could be about anyone. But it was really about a young man who somehow found the strength to put it behind him and someone who got all the strength to put it behind him and someone who got all the success in the world, more success than anybody could ever imagine. And that human being couldn't put it behind him. And to this day is angry, bitter, has a temper. Neil was the

opposite. And that juxtaposition has always amazed me as I look at this story. The one kid who had everything taken from him was able to move on. And the one person who in reality had very little taken from him, yes, he had his job, maybe some humiliation, but he still had three national championships, Olympic gold medal, Hall of Fame. He just couldn't move beyond it. And it tells you about the character of both individuals. Robert, thank you very much. This was a great discussion. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The

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